Loading dozens of data fixtures in a neat manner

Question

I have a Media entity in an app I'm working on that has associations with several other entities: Speaker, Tag, Category, etc.

In the code below I've shown a fixture I've written to create some test-data. It's obviously very long in order to setup and assign the numerous relations between the data.

public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
{
    $videoType = new Mediatype();
    $videoType->setName('video');
    $videoType->setType('video');

    $manager->persist($videoType);

    $speaker1 = new Speaker();
    $speaker1->setName('Joe Bloggs');

    $speaker1->setBiography('Joe Bloggs bio.');

    $manager->persist($speaker1);

    $category1 = new Category();
    $category1->setName('PHP');
    $category1->setSlug('php');

    $manager->persist($category1);

    $tag1 = new Tag();
    $tag1->setName('PHPNW');
    $tag1->setSlug('phpnw');

    $manager->persist($tag1);

    $video1 = new Media();
    $video1->setMediatype($videoType);
    $video1->setSpeakers(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $speaker1
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setCategories(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $category1
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setTags(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $tag1
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setDate(new \Datetime());
    $video1->setCreationDate(new \DateTime());
    $video1->setTitle('My video about PHP');
    $video1->setDescription('A video about PHP!');
    $video1->setContent('http://some.video-url.com');
    $video1->setLength('20:00:00');
    $video1->setRating(2.5);
    $video1->setVisits(100);
    $video1->setLanguage('EN');
    $video1->setHostName('PHP');
    $video1->setHostUrl('php');
    $video1->setStatus('pub');
    $manager->persist($video1);
    $manager->flush();
}

Now I want to replace this fixture with real data and load a dozen or so Media entities in one fixture. I could copy and paste it a dozen times and make change the data but that's messy and harder to maintain. Is there an nice way to load numerous entities of the same type like this?

Answer 1

I realised that the doctrine/data-fixtures bundle already does exactly what I wanted.

To do this I load each entity in their own fixture and do $this->addReference('admin-user', $user); to access it from another fixture using $this->getReference('admin-user');

Loading fixtures that are dependencies is easy too:

public function getDependencies()
{
    // fixture classes that this fixture is dependent on
    return array('MyDataFixtures\MyOtherFixture'); 
}

So now my fixture looks like this:

public function load(ObjectManager $manager)
{
    $video1 = new Media();
    $video1->setMediatype($this->getReference('video'));
    $video1->setSpeakers(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $this->getReference('joe-bloggs')
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setCategories(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $this->getReference('php')
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setTags(
        new ArrayCollection(
            array(
                $this->getReference('phpnw')
            )
        )
    );

    $video1->setDate(new \Datetime());
    $video1->setCreationDate(new \DateTime());
    $video1->setTitle('My video about PHP');
    $video1->setDescription('A video about PHP!');
    $video1->setContent('http://some.video-url.com');
    $video1->setLength('20:00:00');
    $video1->setRating(2.5);
    $video1->setVisits(100);
    $video1->setLanguage('EN');
    $video1->setHostName('PHP');
    $video1->setHostUrl('php');
    $video1->setStatus('pub');

    $manager->persist($video1);
    $manager->flush();
}

/**
 * Load this fixtures dependencies
 * @see https://github.com/doctrine/data-fixtures
 *
 * @return array
 */
public function getDependencies()
{
    return array(
        '...\LoadMediatypeData',
        '...\LoadSpeakerData',
        '...\LoadCategoryData',
        '...\LoadTagData'
    );
}